ERP Implementation Strategy: Where do trials fit in?

Selecting an enterprise resource planning solution is one of the most critical steps in an ERP implementation strategy.  There are a lot of products on the market and choosing the one that offers the functionality, scalability and customizability that will satisfy all of your departments and stake holders is a great challenge.  Choose the right product and it becomes the backbone of your organization for years, choose the wrong solution and risk wasting time and resources and project failure.  The best way to feel-out a software package for compatibility with your company is to test drive it before you buy.

Panorama Consulting offers four things to consider in your ERP implementation strategy for assessing software.

1. How is it to navigate the user interface and how well does the system fit your business operations?
2. Can your easily execute business processes in the system?
3. Are employees able to perform job functions without the software inhibiting their day-to-day responsibilities?
4. Will the company be able to seamlessly, efficiently and effectively run its operations using the system?

“When you are evaluating potential ERP systems, you must ensure that you have clearly defined what employees will need to do with the system,” said Rick Platz, manager of organizational change at Panorama Consulting Solutions. “In other words, specifically how the business processes need to look and how the software needs to support the business. It may sound elementary, but we see far too many organizations gloss over this important step to achieving ERP usability.”

By making ERP software trials an important part of your ERP strategy you can answer many of these questions and move foreward with greater confidence in you evaluation as you have seen firsthand what the software solution can do.

Enterprise software will be the fastest growing sector in IT spending through the next year according to Gartner, and IT services will also rank among the top three spending categories.  As the world increasingly adopts the cloud first, mobile first mentality more and more of these systems will be deployed in the cloud as software as a service.

While the cloud offers simple, streamlined deployment, having a solid ERP implementation strategy in place is still necessary.  In fact one of the things that the cloud does best is delivering ERP software trials.  With the growth of cloud computing, it is easier than ever to get on-demand test drives of the software you are considering, and the test drive has become a critical part of any ERP implementation strategy.